Live Cinema/In the Round: Contemporary Art from the East Mediterranean

September 17, 2010 - February 13, 2011

Live Cinema/In the Round features the works of Ziad Antar, Inci Eviner, Gülsün Karamustafa, Hassan Khan, Maha Maamoun, and Christodoulos Panayiotou, six artists from the Eastern Mediterranean who, in varying ways, explore how the moving image informs representations of reality. Responding to the 'live' reference used in the program title Live Cinema, video and sculptural works create a dialogue around the shift from the live performance of theater to the suspension of reality of cinema. The artists appropriate and recompose the conventions of film to consider how personal expectations, desires, and memories are shaped through cinematic strategies.

Exhibition Minutes

More enlivened than a simple projection program...

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The title of the exhibition, In the Round, takes its cue from the practice of “theater in the round,” in which the audience surrounds the stage, allowing for a more intimate experience for the viewer and a more realistic performance from the actors. Inspired by this theatrical technique, the works in this exhibition are not simply projected on a two-dimensional plane; they surround the audience and also migrate to other galleries within the museum. In each work, the actors (or sometimes the blatant absence of an actor) play out a specific role that invites the audience to imagine other possible narratives for the backdrops that host them.

Sponsors

This exhibition is made possible by The Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, by the Turkish Cultural Foundation, and by the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture, with additional funding from the Turkish Embassy. Public events were supported in part by the University of Delaware Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center and by the Slought Foundation.

Curators

November Paynter, Guest Curator
Adelina Vlas, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Barbara Kutis, Curatorial Intern, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art